free disc space missing

i have a Seagate 80.3 Gig harddrive partitioned useing PM8 divided into 4 partitions, all of a sudden the partition labled Main of 20Gigs with my OS (xp pro) and other utils on it has decided not to show the amount of free disc space i have which has gone from 9Gigs to 15megs so for some reason almost 9Gigs has completely dissapeared,

System restore not an option as it disabled itself deleteing all restore points, have scanned for spy/mal/trojan/virus all cleanCHKDSK reveals nothing, everything works perfectly well on the rest of the partition and on all others if it is possibly a bios fault then that is where i fear to tread

It souds to me that you have a file somewhere that has no file end mark and is swallowing up a lot of space. Run scandisk to see if that solves your problem. Another cause could be that Windows has cornered too much of the drive for its swap files. I don't know XP so can't explain how to do this

Frankly, I don't like massive virtual drives, especially where the OS is concerned. Its bound to slow down the overall performance and, as you can see, swallows up loads of space if let loose. I always allow no more than 2 GB for the OS, including all the hardware drivers, but I then put ALL my software onto a separate virtual drive. Where possible I would also recommend that this was on a second physical drive to speed up the system even more.

i have never had any probs before, my swap file is on another partition, everything i run tells me i only have 9+gigs of data on the partition all prod files add up to this, if i have this (no file end mark) would it not show any physical data anywhere that i can remove as up to now i cannot

The probelm with the missing end-of-file mark is that it may NOT show physical data - just block off the rest of the space from use by another file. As I said, scan disk should resolve this problem for you.

back to it then!! thanks for the reply's xania have tried all you suggested and more but what ever i do i cannot retrieve the lost free space nor do i know how it dissapeared in the first place i am open to any suggestions (even the wierd ones)

Hi woodchip tried online scan from your link, its quite scary how many things it picks up that your usual scanning utils don't, all it found were dissinfected and i have rebooted but to no avail, "disc space abducted by aliens maybe"